So I read all 3 of those articles, and it's still smoke and mirrors to me. Each of the articles falls into one of two traps.

1. Inconsequential. Ok, you built a fancy crypto system.. so what?

2. Misattribution (the IBM article). Ok, you improved a traditional finance system, why is crypto necessary for that (other than marketing purposes?)

I guess it really depends on if you think the idea of decentralized finance is inconsequential. If you're happy with the idea of centralized finance, then I guess most of those things would be inconsequential. The argument for decentralized finance is more philosophical, and perhaps that is where most people are at odds with each other.

Regarding your second point, I understand what you're saying. I guess the benefit of doing that specifically in a blockchain/smart contract system instead if <insert your bespoke system + database of choice here> is you can take contracts that have been verified by others and deploy them on your blockchain and tweak the numbers and be confident on the output. Instead of blockchain, you could use any sort of "industry standard ledger/schema", but no industry standard ledger/schema exists and blockchains do exist.

ImmuDB was posted here the other day, it's pretty young but could be promising for businesses who want the benefits of blockchain without needing to use a blockchain.

https://github.com/codenotary/immudb

Blockchain's biggest benefit is disturbed verification, so trust the community and not one authority. Right?

Yet the cost is distributed externalities like burning nonrenewables or wasting greener energy sources on inefficient or pointless calculations.

Are there any smart contracts or DeFi without the externalities problem?

And even if there are then is it wise to put money into things one doesn't understand? The DAO exploit makes me wonder if the juice is really worth the squeeze.

There are multiple Proof-of-Stake networks already running successful DeFi projects.

Harmony One, Polygon, Fantom to name a few (Polkadot/Substrate is growing quickly, too). ETH2 is obviously going to be the big one, though.

DeFi will be moving off of proof-of-work later this year along with the rest of Ethereum and that will cut electricity use by ~99.9%

I sure hope so. But of course everyone invested in Bitcoin, dogecoin, and the others have a vested interest in that never becoming the thing to do. The ones with the mining factories are going to try to prevent this, since it's their competitive advantage.

But even if that happens (and it would be great), there's still everything else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27345786